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Estonian Business School
Maris Zernand EBS is a private business school of university standing, offering Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorate level programs in the field of business administration, public administration and information technology management. When EBS was founded in 1988, it was the first institution in Estonia to introduce diploma business education. Since business administration did not exist in the soviet university syllabi, there was no teaching tradition, no faculty and no textbooks: a difficult starting position. Adapting to the Estonian context has meant, for example, that EBS uses many practitioners and higher level managers as lecturers for its courses, and that EBS acknowledges and appreciates that most of its students work full-time or part-time in addition to studying. Another factor is that we have used both English and Estonian as languages of instruction, thus preparing students for the Estonian market and beyond. Starting from zero can also be seen as an advantage, in so far as we were not tied down by outdated procedures and overwhelming traditions from the past. One example of this is the opportunity this afforded us for finding the right ratio of full-time to part-time lecturers. The opportunity to learn from best practices at other institutions around the world has been extremely useful. The growth and development of EBS reflects what could be called a multiple-customer approach: we have tried to cater not only to our students, but also to our students' employers and to society as a whole. In doing so, it seems that EBS is well in line with trends among business education institutions worldwide. The notions of anticipating change, revising traditional programs to fit actual needs, and last but not least, applying management theory and best business practices in the running of the institution itself, appear to be gaining more and more acceptance even in the more traditional and slow-changing environments of Western business schools. |
